I look back on completing this game, and I remember that this ending made me cry. It was just so beautiful and enchanting but also exuberantly bewildering... I don't know.
It was very enchanting to me too, the music in the background and all the graphic work going on, it just made everything in the world seem so insignificant and petty. Enjoying being alive, people, wind, heat, water, and the art in the world, it is truly a great thing.
It actually made my eyes hurt at times but it was still cool. I like trippy things like that having to do with the nature of the universe but the cubes zooming into other cubes, I had to look away for a minute. Lol.
Okay so I think I get it now. This is one of the few games, perhaps the only one, in which the incomplete ending is actually the _good_ ending. FEZ is a time loop, right? It's never-ending. Eternal. Every time you beat the game, it just starts over. But think about how Gomez feels throughout FEZ. If you think it's tedious for us, the _players_, to figure out all those crazy and ridiculously complex secrets and puzzles, just imagine what a pain in the ass it must be for _him_, the guy who's _actually doing the work_. You think he wants to be trapped in an eternity of this shit? Probably not. Remember when the owl said not to trust the hypercube? The hypercube is Dot, so the owl was telling Gomez not to trust Dot. And what did Dot want Gomez to do? She wanted him to beat the game, to reboot the universe. Think about it: did the universe really need rebooting? Obviously, in this ending, something went wrong, and Gomez failed to fix it, and the universe couldn't reboot properly. But, considering what a pain in the ass this game was for him, isn't that a _good_ thing? Failing to reboot the universe didn't mean the end of the _universe_; it just meant the end of the _plot line_. By failing in his quest, Gomez has finally broken free of his eternal cycle of being the main character in a video game. That's why he's so happy. He's happy because now, he gets to stop hunting around for cubes, and devote more time to his _true_ passion: music. Now, consider what this means for when Gomez _succeeds_ in rebooting the universe, when he gets all of the everything. He's once again sealing himself in this eternal loop, this time permanently. The universe crashing was Gomez's one chance to escape, and he blew it all by listening to some fancy-pants rainbow hypercube. That's why the 64-cube ending is all foreboding and creepy. He'll be trapped in FEZ for the rest of his life. As for getting the heart cubes and completing the heart, maybe that represents Gomez's acceptance of his role as a video game character. He's able to live at peace with his eternal fate in this small, blocky world. Maybe that's why the super-secret hack code you put in at the altar to faux-reboot the game doesn't seem to actually change anything. Gomez doesn't need a new game mechanic anymore. His adventuring days are over, simply because he says so, and he's content to just sit around and not accomplish much, and enjoy the peace.
The first time I got this ending, I waited around long enough for Gomez to lie down and take a nap in the last moments of the zoom-in, and man was that unnerving.
The original piece was written by Chopin and is called "Prelude in E minor (Op. 28)" Interestingly enough, in regards to Fez, Prelude in E minor is famously associated with despair.
I have the impression that there are also similarities with a song composed by an AI in the series "the 8 show": ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lTBbnivy76Q.html
Here's what I'm getting from this. What happened is the universe couldn't reboot completely because you only gathered half its data. It tried to do it anyway, and in this attempt, it finally broke for good. By failing to gather all the cubes, which were actually pieces of the universe's main program, you killed the universe and everyone in it. As for why Gomez is super stoked on life about that, I have no fucking clue.
I read somewhere that this is a cycle that just repeats continuously, and that the message conveyed in this whole zooming-in thing is the meaninglessness of all existence on an atomic level--and then when it zooms out, there's still meaning in existence on a personal or organic level. And we can appreciate existence a bit more if we try not to think it on an atomic level. Or something. Haven't seen the full ending yet myself though, maybe there's a better explanation there.
Personally I didn't interpret this ending as "breaking the universe". I saw it as the Hexahedron being able to reformat itself from the cubes you managed to find. But yeah, this ending felt more cinematic compared to the 64cube one. Plus you get that drum solo making it seem happy.
I think either the Hexahedron was able to reform, but in a limited capacity or the code from the cubes was able to stick together and keep the world Gomez lives in alive.
thanks for uploading, for some reason my sound cut out when i went into the moon stage and i thought that was meant to be part of the game, so i literally sat through the whole ending and everything with no sound. dammit fez can't tell if youre trolling or legit glitching
I still see this ending as a failure, because at the very start, Dot tells you that you have to find all the cubes OR ELSE the universe will collapse with you in it. Well... you didn't get all the cubes, but still tried to compile the hexahedron. So you get to watch your world get crushed tinier and tinier as it collapses. :( That, and the funereal prelude used for the abstract ending as we delve into the unravelling fabric of the universe... it gives the strong impression of a bad ending.
Dude I dunno but I think I get it. After Gomez is reduced to a single pixel and his 2D world completely dies out... we surf on the Fez's surface while the view pans over to what remains of Gomez. We then get a glimpse of the inner machinations of the fez as it ushers in an infinite number of new 3D worlds through him. His lineage have served their purpose.
Gomez has managed to break the loop and set himself free from this hellscape that is the game. He is no longer needed for this adventure. He can finally follow his passion: music.
There is no game like FEZ and it's depressing when you discover there was a planned sequel that got canned. It has a superficial collections of, well, collectables in the form of the yellow cubes, the more abstract and trickier set of puzzles by the form of the anti-cubes and then there's the three hardest puzzles in the form of the three red cubes. The way this game sets up different mechanics and it's own fictional number system and language to weave complex puzzles is just fascinating. The worst part is that we have two puzzles that were brute forced into being solved and that we don't know how we were meant to solve them (if you've played this game a long time ago you'll know what puzzles im talking about). It may be quite old and occasionaly buggy but it has kept it's uniqueness throughout all theese years. It's worth playing.
the bad ending is like zooming in. and the good ending is zooming out. The bad ending symbolizes premature transcedence , the good ending symbolizes true transcendence.
fez was awesome in no other game was i intrigued by the world so much, and i also wanted to learn what has happening and why it was, every cube i got i felt closer to figuring out what was going on, then i got to the ending, then after the ending i sat back, wondered what just happened and laughed, then i started new game plus, at that point i realized, i was so far from the secrets of this game, so i continued to play, explore, and experience, in no other game i have done this, fez is awesome.
not sure that’s at all possible, you have to get a cube to exit the earliest portion of the game. although i guess you could get one of the village anticubes early, if that’s possible
1 ending is like you broke all dimensions and existence, the second ending sums out and shows you the "paralel" universes within each dimension, just like string theory says 8i think or something like that). The thing that follows you everywhere is a cube in the fourth dimension. I think its kinda cool, i dont know, it said something to me... it depends on everyone, i think it was fantastic.
The things with tentacles can see 4dimensions because they have 4 eyes you see 3 because you have two the rooms you can't rotate in were made by ancient villagers with one eye that could only see 2d
Everyone seems to have different takeaways from this ending, but i shall give my two cents: I believe this ending represents nihilism in its purest form, when you analyze the universe looking for meaning, you peel back layers until you find nothing at the end. If you ask a scientist where enough energy for the big bang came from, they won't be able to tell you, if you ask a christian how god was created, they won't be able to give a logical answer, and even if either did know the answers, you could continue asking questions, and you either keep asking questions and never find a true answer to how anything exists, or you would find out that there is no answer, the universe just IS, without any ultimate explanation. In the ending of fez, it keeps zooming in, until there's nothing left but the infinite void of nothingness. My takeaway is that the end of the universe is meaningless, because the universe never existed in the first place. The sequence ultimately ends in darkness, before zooming back out, to Gomez, having observed the truth of the universe, and being totally cool with it, as he should be. This ending has practically shaped my worldview, which is not something many other games could ever manage, but fez is exceptional in that regard.
I really hate those endings, I thought the 64 cubes ending would save me but no its the same shit, but it zooms out instead. I thought the plot was about saving the world. Not scare the crap out of everyone.